At Home with John and Debbie

Starting when we were students at Aston, and continuing after we graduated and still lived in Birmingham, we frequented a comedy night called the GAG Club. The GAG Club is not to be confused with the Glee Club. The Glee Club is a corporate hospitality provider with comedians. The GAG Club was a weekly night run by real enthusiasts upstairs at Heroes Bar because they loved it — and predates the Glee Club in Birmingham by a few years.

At the GAG, your ticket included a meal of baked potato and chilli (or something like that), I think in order to qualify for later licence.

Why am I telling you this? Well, this blog is honoured to have received a comment out of the blue from GAG club compere Reg Nice himself. I’ll be copying the comment into the comments on this post. My strongest memory of Reg is when he found out that a number of us were trainees at IBM, and started telling us about his time selling AS/400s — no jokes, but all true.

One evening, Reg couldn’t make it, so his mum had to step in: Barbara Nice. Barbara as in Streisand, Nice as in the biscuit. Reg and his mum went on to compere as a double act, before eventually Reg left for “dirty London”. Barbara was comedy gold. I spent years in denial that it was an act, only really acknowledging the actress Janice Connolly when she later appeared as the barmaid in Phoenix Nights.

One night, Barbara and Reg killed time between acts by engaging the audience in a game of Hangman. The phrase turned out to be “NECROTISING FASCIITIS”. “That’s sick”, said someone. “It’s not us that’s sick, love.” replied Barbara, “It’s Gloucester.”

It’s a little unsettling to see people on film and TV now, to whom we were introduced as a crowd of 100 or so at the GAG club. Simon Pegg performed for us, second on the bill to his flatmate Smiley. Reginald D Hunter was a weekly fixture for a while, with a seemingly endless supply of new material. Stewart Lee, now an embittered paranoid alcoholic who writes musicals, was then a promising young comedian.

One night, Frank Skinner was performing over the road at the Hippodrome: but he popped into the GAG club when he finished, to catch the end of the final act, and to say hello.

Ah good times.

Reg asks about flyers etc. Sadly, the one in my scrapbook pages (on Flickr) is the only one I’ve managed to keep. Anyone else got anything?

This entry was posted on Monday, February 5th, 2007 at 15:25 and is filed under Social. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.